The honour of being pioneering Bright Starlets
By the time she turned 18, Bulgak was already on the basketball trail. But it wasn’t always like this for the young girl, who was born in a refugee camp in Kenya, where her parents relocated to escape the long civil war. The 6ft 3in (1.93m) athlete’s first love was in fact volleyball.
“I started playing tennis first and then I couldn’t find a doubles partner, so I transitioned to volleyball when I was 10. I played for nine years, and then I ended up dislocating my shoulder in high school. That forced me out of the game of volleyball,” she said in an interview with Olympics.com in Segovia, Northeast of the capital Madrid, where they trained ahead of the 2025 AfroBasket.
“After that, I was introduced to basketball. I didn’t know anything about it, didn’t enjoy it and didn’t even like the sport, but I couldn’t bring myself to just stop playing sports and so that’s how my journey with basketball began.”
Basketball became an escape after experiencing personal tragedy. In 2007, her eldest brother was murdered in the family backyard, and two years later, another brother was killed in a car accident.
“I’ve always been held back from telling my story, but I do realise there’s so much healing and power in telling your story because you don’t know what the next person beside you is going through,” she said with tears welling in her eyes.
“They could be going through the same or something worse, and they feel like they have nobody, but you’re so much more similar and sports has become that binder for us and for many girls.”
Those girls are her Bright Starlets teammates who made it to the national team, which was their dream. After just four years, there’s been incremental progress being made in the women’s game.
“It’s been a lot of changing pieces over the last four years because the majority of our girls play at the Collegiate level and [Africa] Zone 5 is in February, which is usually around conference championships for colleges. We weren’t able to get a lot of our key players. I’ve already played with over 22 girls since then, but it’s getting there.”